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A C. D. Sloan Mystery

Catherine Aird

for Margaret, Elizabeth, Sarah

and Nicholas with love

The chapter headings are taken from

The Doctor's Dilemma—A Tragedy

by Bernard Shaw (1913).

CHAPTER ONE

The patient was a hardy old lady who was not easily killed.

‘St Ninian's Hospital,' said the girl on the switchboard. ‘Dr Beaumont? Hold the line, please … putting you through … St Ninian's Hospital … Forman Ward?… It's ringing now … St Ninian's Hospital … I'm afraid there's no reply from Psychiatric Appointments, caller. Will you hold?'

What the caller said in answer to this simple question brought an affronted flush to the telephone operator's cheek but she had been well trained and merely offered, in impersonal, detached tones, to try the number again if the caller wished.

‘St Ninian's Hospital …' The switchboard operator, whose name was Shirley Partridge, had developed a special sing-song voice quite unlike her everyday speech—which was pure Calleshire—for using at work. This, like the old-fashioned cubicle in which she worked, served to separate her from the real world in more senses than one.

‘St Ninian's Hospital …' She gave her response to the next caller with the same sure promptness as a programmed robot. ‘Barnesdale Ward? I'm afraid the number's engaged. Will you hold or try later?'

Shirley Partridge glanced at the clock and wondered if it was too early to unscrew her thermos flask of coffee. ‘St Ninian's Hospital … Mr McGrew's Clinic Secretary? Ringing now … Mr Maldonson? He's not in yet, I'm afraid, Sister.'

The telephonist knew that Mr Maldonson, the Senior Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist, wasn't in the hospital because his Registrar, Dr Marion Teal, had asked her this twice already this morning.

‘St Ninian's Hospital … Dr Byville? No. He said to say if he wasn't at Berebury he'd be over at the Safety of Drugs Committee at Calleford all morning.' Shirley Partridge prided herself on keeping tabs on the whereabouts of all the hospital's medical staff. You never knew when they'd be wanted in a hurry.

‘Switchboard.' This was Shirley's usual response to a call coming up on an inside line, the internal telephone system at the old hospital not yet being fully automated. ‘Dr Meggie? No, he hasn't arrived yet.' She shifted her head a fraction so that she could see the wooden ‘In and Out' attendance board better. The line with the name of Dr P. E. L. Meggie, Consultant Physician, on it was clearly showing ‘Out' still, in spite of the fact that it had already gone ten o'clock in the morning on a busy Friday.

As Shirley Partridge knew very well, Dr Paul Meggie, the hospital's senior physician, always had a clinic on Friday mornings. She also knew very well—but did not say so to the unknown caller—that Martin Friar, Dr Meggie's unfortunate Senior Registrar, had been rung up quite early this morning and detailed to start that clinic on Dr Meggie's behalf.

She knew, too, that this would occasion mixed feelings in the registrar—torn, as he was, between serious overwork and the desire for greater experience. She was also aware that the patients who had come to see the great man himself at his clinic would be unhappy about seeing his registrar instead. She took both facts in her stride, neither being her problem. Shirley Partridge had never been one for taking on other people's problems.

Both parties had her sympathy.

The Senior Registrar had looked tired out before he had even started work this morning; and the clinic patients naturally weren't going to like being fobbed off by being seen by someone medically speaking—they thought, anyway—still wet behind the ears. And for another thing they weren't going to like the way he dressed any more than Shirley did.

‘Informally,' was how she had described it to her mother. ‘Not even a jacket …'

Now their Dr Paul Meggie was quite different. He always wore a dark pin-stripe suit under his spotless white coat. And he was never seen at the hospital in the mornings without his bow-tie and floral button-hole. ‘A fresh one every day,' Shirley reported again and again to her mother. This week it had been the tiniest of yellow carnations.

Late for his clinic or not, as far as Shirley Partridge was concerned, Dr Paul Meggie was a Great Man and in her considered opinion the patients were lucky even to catch a quick glimpse of him. That alone—just setting eyes on him—did some of the people who were ill a lot of good. They said upstairs at the hospital that he'd only got to step on to the ward for the atmosphere to change at once.

Electrify, some of the nurses said.

‘St Ninian's Hospital … Accident and Emergency … of course, right away.' They always answered quickly at that unit, which was something. ‘St Ninian's Hospital … Lorkyn Ward … putting you through.' For some long-forgotten antiquarian reason the wards at St Ninian's Hospital had been named after noted medical practitioners of the sixteenth century. ‘Ringing now,' sang Shirley in her working voice.

There was nothing in any way electrifying about the way in which Dr Martin Friar entered the Medical Out-Patients' Clinic that morning. Dr Meggie's Senior Registrar was so tired that for two pins—or, better still, an unbroken night's sleep—he would have given up the profession of medicine altogether there and then. He moved into the consulting room at the clinic now with the slow measured step of one consciously conserving his reserves of energy.

‘Big clinic today, Sister?' he asked.

‘Not particularly,' she said kindly, bending the truth a little, and knowing that he would be feeling better after coffee-time.

‘Anything interesting?'

‘One or two of the new cases perhaps.' She placed the virgin folder that indicated a fresh patient in front of him. The sight of thin, unsullied hospital medical records always cheered the young doctors, just as a pile of thick, fat ones awaiting them on the desk sent a sigh of despair through whoever was taking the clinic. The thick folders usually belonged to those who were called ‘heart-sink' patients, for the very good reason that they caused just that very sensation in the breasts of their weary doctors. Thin folders at least offered the chance of making an interesting diagnosis …

The Senior Registrar picked up the blank record of a new patient. ‘Mrs Mabel Allison of Great Rooden? That's right out in the country, isn't it? All right, Sister, just give me half a minute to read the GP's referral letter and then you can call her in.' At the same time Shirley Partridge was answering a call on her switchboard in yet another way.

‘Morning, Tracy,' she said, there being no need to enquire who would be on the end of this particular line. It was a direct land-line connection between St Ninian's Hospital, which was on the coast at Kinnisport, and the Berebury District General Hospital over in Berebury, the market town in the centre of rural Calleshire.

The hospital at Berebury was a spanking new one with state-of-the-art equipment and all that medical technology could dream up in the name of progress. St Ninian's, on the other hand, was an old Poor Law institution: not to put too fine a point on it, it had been a workhouse before the advent of the National Health Service. True, it had been upgraded as far as was humanly possible—even now there was an artist labouring away on the painting of a colourful mural in the main entrance hall—but there was still that about the old raw brick building which betokened a more rugged past.

‘That you, Shirl?' asked the voice at the other end of the land-line.

The two hospitals were run in tandem under one unified health authority. They shared consultant staff—which was no problem—and some facilities—which was the cause of a lot of rancour. In theory—and at a pinch when beds were short—they would house each other's patients but it didn't happen often.

And never without some delicate horse-trading over waiting lists.

‘Listen, Shirl,' said Tracy, who, as Shirley regularly complained to her mother, had no proper respect for her elders. ‘You got Dr Beaumont over there?'

Shirley Partridge didn't need to look up at the staff attendance board to answer her. Dr Edwin Beaumont was always on time. He was in, all right. She herself had seen him step delicately round the painter who was working on the wall of the entrance lobby when Dr Beaumont had come in.

Not painter, she reminded herself.

Artist.

‘Good,' said Tracy swiftly. ‘Then can you put me through to him p.d.q.? Female Medical are carrying on like there's no today let alone no tomorrow—'

The wards at the new Berebury General Hospital didn't enjoy names redolent of an historic medical past. They were known by what went on in them and that, even the postmodernists were prepared to admit, did lead to some embarrassing moments.

‘—and Sister Pocock's going spare,' went on Tracy, ‘because she can't get hold of anyone.'

‘Right away.' Actually, Shirley had been all ready to complain to Tracy about how the smell of paint in the hall was upsetting her delicate digestion—stomach was not a word used in the Partridge ménage—but that would have to wait.

Tracy drew breath and went on, ‘Sounds like there's open warfare up there on Female Medical. You know what Sister Pocock's like.'

‘You're through.' Shirley Partridge, much as she disapproved of Tracy's free and easy way of putting things, hooked in the telephone connection without delay.

‘Ta, ever so ta.' Young Tracy usually used what spare time she had on the land-line talking to Shirley about her current boyfriend and what she'd been up to the night before—well, nearly everything—but this was not the moment for that.